SEO

SEO Isn’t Dead, or Is It?

Over the last few years, SEO has pretty much been the buzzword when it comes to online marketing. It’s a big industry with over 860 million websites mentioning SEO globally. Every second, 105 people search for SEO links on Google. Many of them are looking for SEO companies and services.

Interestingly enough, SEO success cannot even be measured with certainty. For example, effective search engine optimisation will land your site at the top of search engine results in Brisbane. But can you really measure how much that improved your business? Did you get a higher conversion or did you just get a higher bounce rate?

But as Google’s algorithms move away from rewarding SEO principles, one has to wonder. Is SEO dead?

SEO may no longer hold the answer to traffic-related questions. More and more, Google is pushing for better quality, relevant, reliable and authoritative content. Unfortunately, that’s almost the antithesis of good SEO. But Google doesn’t really care about that. After all, they don’t earn a single dime out of a fully optimized site. What they worry about now is fielding search results that leave users underwhelmed.

Put it this way, because of the way the algorithms were made before, search engine results pages (SERPs) will display sites with the best and most effective samples of SEO. That won’t necessarily mean that those same sites have the best content. The culprit, of course, is the keyword popularity data Google used to provide. Site owners look up the keywords relevant to their sites and started producing content peppered with these words to boost their rankings in SERPs. Meta tags were stuffed with top keywords.

Google isn’t stupid, however, and realized what’s happening. They stopped producing the keyword data report in 2013 in what was seen as a clear signal that the company is putting a damper on SEO. The report was rightly seen as skewing results and that’s not helpful to users.

SEO then became more complicated because Google started refining its algorithms. Currently, it calls for:

no keyword stuffing

domain longevity

quality content

no duplicate content

well-ordered site map

no phony links

In other words, Google wants great sites filled with even greater content.

With the new direction Google is taking, SEO watchers are starting to say that if search engine optimisation isn’t dead yet, then it’s certainly dying. Google doesn’t want anyone playing with SERP rankings. And being the behemoth that it is, it usually gets whatever it wants.

2 things to keep in mind for a successful Search Engine Optimisation Campaign

The more authoritative your page appears to Google, the higher your page will rank.

Ranking means the way search engines display results. Your goal, of course, is to be at the top of the results. Or at least on the first page. Research have shown that people rarely click on page 2 results of any search engine.

So how do you get Google to rank you higher?

Write content that makes use of words and phrases people who search for your product uses

Build links to your pages

Linking is important.

We’ve been talking about links and linking from the get-go. So what is it?

Well, it simply means “tagging” other quality webpages to your page. Let’s say your website talks about knitting and you know of a place that sells customized yarn colors. You can link out to their webpage. Similarly, other webpages may link out to you if they deem your content to be valuable.

In this way, linking to pages is almost like getting votes. The more links you get, the higher your page usually ranks.

But be careful. Remember the whole “authoritative” part in number 1? Google will still scan if you’re linking to quality sites. You may have 15 different links on a 700-word article, but if none of them is from a great site, they’re almost useless.